


A Pot of Water

by PermianExtinction



Series: Tropoverse Canon [3]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Aftermath - Chuck Wendig
Genre: Child Abuse, Childhood Trauma, Gen, Implied Child Death, Pre-Canon, Religious Abuse, Weird Jakku Religion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-26
Updated: 2017-11-26
Packaged: 2019-02-06 17:59:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12823008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PermianExtinction/pseuds/PermianExtinction
Summary: Eight-year-old Galli misbehaves and is given a special lesson -- not for the first time, not for the last.





	A Pot of Water

The anchorite habit house lay a short walk from town, on a plain that was wreathed in mirages when the sun was highest. In that zenith hour, thorny-backed lizards guzzled up the beating rays, but everything else hid. There were places on Jakku where the sand dunes were deep and yellow and sculpted by wind; this was not such a place, rather, it was dusty and cracked like parched lips. 

Save for the water in the bodies of animals and people, nearly all of the moisture within a half-klick radius of the building was stored in a stone-walled hut in plasteel tanks. Full tanks were delivered monthly to the habit house by the townsfolk, a donation of a kind in exchange for the services the anchorites provided.

Such precious stuff was always carefully rationed. So it was that one day, like all the others, when the heat of noon was beginning to pass, the twenty-odd children in the care of this particular house came out of prayers for the second of three daily allotted water rations.

The children began shuffling into the water line under the shade of a ratty canvas awning. They all knew their places and could form up half-sleeping; it was the same line every day, three times a day, though the first of them would go to the back when next they gathered, moving things along in steady rotation. 

To them, this was fair; line-skippers would be swiftly punished by their fellows, and being first was treated as something to look forward to, as if the water was particularly colder and clearer and sweeter. Everyone had been first and last and all through the middle more times than they could count, and they knew it tasted much the same no matter what, but most of them still agreed, unclearly, that the system they had was the best one.

So each of them, from the tiny and potbellied to the gangly and pimpled, found those that came before them and behind them, and when they were done with that there was a pronounced gap near the back of the line. A boy whose nose was peeling from sunburn and a girl with one clouded eye looked at each other a bit knowingly across this child-shaped space. 

No one was saying much, because they weren’t supposed to. Most of them didn’t waste energy thinking about it either, and let the heat put them in a dreary haze. A few of the nosier children kept glancing back at the chapel, straining their ears for the expected hiss of a switch, the yelps and insolent protestations. 

They could hear a low, adult voice speaking: Kolob’s voice. It was a tone of voice they had learned to dread from any of the grown-ups, Kolob in particular. But they heard nothing in response. 

Then the door opened and the anchorite brought the miscreant out into the judgement of the sunlight. 

The assembled orphans watched silently. Pulled along by one skinny wrist, Galli was silent too, silent at last, with a sour twist to his lips and the rigid gaze of the cornered and guilty. As he passed the water line, he veered towards it as if hoping this was the end of it and he’d be let off, but Kolob tugged his arm sharply and Galli stumbled in the sand, frown deepening, eyes fixing harder on the horizon. It was far from the first time Galli had made trouble during prayers, but he’d been expecting a switching this time, like the others he could remember. Now he knew there would be _special_ consequences.

Midday service kept them out of the sweltering noon sun, so it should have been two hours of relief. But it could feel more like two hours of torture. There was the wordless kneeling, listening to the desiccated _rattle rattle rattle_ of the chimes. Galli hated that. Sometimes he played a game where he pretended the rattling was of a great sand-serpent’s tail, and he had to be very still and quiet or it would gobble him up. But it wasn’t a _fun_ thing to imagine. They said you could kill a sand-serpent by getting a blade right between its eyes, and he wished he could play _that_ game instead, a game of heroics, instead of being a cowering little thing. 

There was also chanting, and Galli hated that too. When he was very young, he could say the words all together as one big slurred mess and it meant nothing. But he was eight years old now and no matter how he tried to shut it out, he could hear them ringing in his head: _I lay my life before the feet of Erem. I lay my soul before the throne of Erem._ And, here as well, he felt so tiny, like those giant feet would stand as their owner rose from the throne and he, the insignificant Galli-bug, would be squashed flat beneath them. Even though he knew they were just metaphors, and weren’t real.

Sometimes he thought he could break the spell by not saying the words quite right. But Kolob had keen ears and he would come over and scold Galli for mumbling. Then Galli would have to chant by himself, over and over while the rest of the children waited and listened. And saying the prayers wrong was very wicked indeed. Everyone knew Dark users couldn’t say them at all, lest their tongues catch fire in their mouths.

Most often, he was wicked because he couldn’t hold still. His knees had a mind of their own and if he was lost in his head they would quiver and rock him back and forth out of sheer agitation, and he wouldn’t realize they were doing it until his backside or calves had been smacked. 

That had happened on this particular day, and he was still smarting from it. But then had come the questions of scripture, and Galli hated them most passionately of all. It seemed like the more attentively you considered the answers, the wronger you were.Eventually you learned to endure it. Speak, be corrected, fall silent. Always absorbing the ultimate lesson of humility. 

Even before anything happened, Galli knew he would be behaving badly today. He felt it coming the way he imagined the seers of Old Jakku received portents from the cosmos. It started with a very little girl in the group who had come to the orphanage a few days prior. Her father had been buried in the mines by a collapsed tunnel, and her mother couldn’t look after her. Her name was Ayer, and she had a runny nose. It was miraculous that even on this driest of worlds, her body could produce so much moisture. Prayer had been punctuated by the occasional _schlorp_ as she sniffled up whatever was dripping out of her nostrils, and it had been maddening. Disruptive, you could even say. But _she_ hadn’t been smacked for it. 

Galli cornered her while they were all rearranging themselves for questions. Little Ayer, unsure of where she was supposed to go, stared up at him with bugging blue eyes.

“Blow your nose,” Galli ordered. He would accept no arguments to this. 

“They tol’ me I shouldn’t,” the girl murmured, but she sneezed dutifully into her robe and wiped her face. Probably she would be leaking again within a minute, but it gave Galli some relief all the same. “Um. What do we do now?”

It was the girl’s first time at prayer, but she’d stayed still and quiet — aside from the sniffling. It was clear she wanted to do things right. 

“Answer questions,” Galli told him.

“I dun’t…” Ayer had a thin voice, like a breeze that couldn’t even tickle the sweat on your neck. “Dunno any answers.”

“Nobody does,” Galli griped, and it gave him deep satisfaction to share this truth. “Everyone just guesses. Sometimes you get hit if you get it wrong.” That wasn’t quite true. Usually you only got hit if you got it wrong in a particularly Galli-ish way.

“Sometimes…?”

“ _You_ probably will be,” Galli said vindictively. “You don’t know anything yet.”

The five-year-old blanched and hugged her knees. Then she tried to clutch Galli’s sleeve, but got her hand smacked away. The kid was all germy, probably contagious.

“Help me,” Ayer pleaded. “Tell me what to say.”

“Just say…” Galli hesitated. It wasn’t his place to give anyone scripture answers. You had to be chosen for that, chosen after years of study. He wondered what a real priest would tell Ayer, a priest of Old Jakku. Kolob never taught them much about the time before the desert, which meant they should not dwell on it, but Galli dwelled on it even more. He dwelled _in_ it, a cocoon of imagined customs and practices that he was always inventing, revising, discarding. His vision of the ancient priests was equal parts contemptuous and romanticized: they were both archaically foolish (because they had not foreseen the end of their civilization) and imposingly exotic.

Right now he couldn’t decide if they gave blessings with water on the brow or a kiss. Both were highly symbolic.

“Are you of the Force?” he asked the girl.

“I ‘unno?”

“You’ve heard of the _Force_ , right?” His tone became patronizing. “The spirit of the universe? It surrounds and binds together all life? You’re alive, aren’t you?”

Ayer bobbed her head up and down. 

“If you trust the Force, why wouldn’t _it_ tell you what to say?” 

“Will it?” Ayer asked with hope in her eyes.

Galli didn’t answer, and wriggled between a cluster of children to take his place on the far end of the room.

Now they were a circle, backs to the walls, with the empty center taken up by Kolob, who rapped the end of his chime-staff against the floor. Everyone fell silent, dry tongues stilling.

The questions began to be passed around, with Kolob gesturing to a child at random to give their answer.

“What is duty?”

“Duty is what we must, um, do.”

Pass. “Why must we do our duties?”

Another voice: “Because it is right.”

That got a pass too. “What makes it right?”

“The word of Erem.”

One thing you were never allowed to do was steal attention. If it sounded like you were unsure, you still had to say one short thing and then shut up. If you started talking aloud to work out the answer out, or tried to explain why you thought you were right, that was being selfish.

“Who gives the word?”

Galli hunkered down, shoulders defensively huddled together. “The Texts,” he told Kolob.

That was a wrong answer. Not false. It was true, and it was also wrong. Kolob shook his head and pointed to another member of the circle. “What has he mistaken?”

Sun-burned Brev cleared his throat. “The word is given by the Force, through the Eremite’s Texts.”

“But that’s the same thing,” Galli blurted out, because he didn’t see how he’d been wrong. And he received a rap on the head for speaking out of turn. He tried to force his tongue all the way into the back of his mouth. 

But he had still spoken, and Kolob chose his next question in response to Galli’s interruption. “What has he mistaken?” he said again, and pointed at Narawal, because she had a good memory for history and would give the best answer. 

“The Texts survived when all unholiness was cleansed by the desert. They were chosen by the Force as the word of its seed.”

Even if Galli hated it when she corrected him in front of everyone, Nara was the only one willing to talk with him about Old Jakku. She disagreed with almost every one of his fanciful ideas but at least she wasn’t a tattletale.

Finally, the round of questions came to Ayer. Unfortunately, instead of paying attention, she had become distant and glassy-eyed, and she was still sniffling mucus. It was unclear how much of anything was getting through to her. When Kolob pointed his staff at her, bone chimes rattling, she simply swayed in place, as if her mind was asleep. A taller girl next to her poked an elbow into Ayer’s shoulder, and she jolted, focusing on the end of the staff.

“Who reads the Texts?” the anchorite intoned. It was a common question, and an easy one for a newcomer. 

And yet silence stretched on. Ayer’s tiny whisper only came through after another nudge from the girl at her right. 

“My…” She fidgeted. “My mother… read to me…?”

Several of the children around the circle locked their jaws and turned their faces away. 

For once, Kolob responded directly. “The Eremite Texts,” he said sharply. “Not just any books. You know of the Texts.”

It wasn’t meant to be a question, but when the little girl hesitated and then murmured, “Don’t… know…”, even Galli had to cringe. Ayer seemed to wake up, then. She was aware she’d said something deeply wrong. “I mean, yes! I do! She read them. Yes.”

Kolob frowned heavily. Everyone knew that wasn’t possible, because there were only a few copies of the Eremite Texts scattered across the planet. So he turned to another child to elicit that correction. “What has she mistaken?” he asked.

But Ayer was already trying to defend herself, and she cut off another child’s words as she blurted out, “She did read things. About the Force. Stories about the Force! I remember.”

There was false courage in the little girl’s watery eyes. She didn’t know what it was like, yet. Maybe she’d been smacked around a bit by the adults, but just for brief, unremarkable reasons. Don’t touch that, don’t eat that, don’t say that. And then it would be forgotten and forgiven. But to live in service was to have every mistake remembered in the eyes of Erem, the great seed of the Force. There would always be a debt to pay. That was what _suffering_ meant. To suffer was to endure the weight of your sins. 

And poor Ayer would not understand this until she had sinned. Galli found himself leaning into the circle, taut with anticipation.

Kolob slammed the base of his staff into the floor. “ _Galli!_ ” he barked. “What have you been feeding this feeble mind?”

Galli flinched back. The tips of his fingers and toes were prickling. _No!_ he thought. _It wasn’t me this time!_ He tried to shrink into the circle before Kolob could turn around. “I didn’t tell her anything—” 

Kolob spun around, caught his ear quicker than a striking snake, and dragged him into the middle of the circle. “Will you ever learn to hold that lying tongue? I saw you speaking with the girl.”

“I didn’t tell her anything! What’s wrong with what I said? I told her to listen to the Force!” Galli struggled, or tried to, but his body had gone strangely weak at the joints. “That’s what— that’s what you’re supposed to do…” 

“Listen to the Force…” The man sighed. “Can you do that, Galli? Are you a priest? What is it telling you?”

Galli shivered, and did not answer. _Was_ the Force telling him something? He heard nothing, no presence, no special voice. The inside of his head had never been so lonely. There was only the twinge of pain where his ear was still being pinched.

“See how easily the untrained mind can twist the truth,” Kolob said. “You must think yourself very wise, boy, to be handing out advice.” 

And then, because she didn’t know any better, because some idiot told her it was a good idea to speak her mind, Ayer sniffled up snot and raised a tentative hand. “He was just helping me,” she offered, and peeked at Galli, as if expecting his approval. It felt odd to be looked at like that. Not bad. Just odd. 

“No, child.” Instead of being firm, Kolob sounded pitying. “He was trying to lead you astray. Galli is a troublesome boy.”

Rage struck like lightning deep within him. Perhaps it was the special voice he had been listening for in that moment. It was blinding. Galli stamped his foot so hard it stung. “ _I am not!_ ” he shrieked.

He wrenched his head away, and stumbled in the dirt. Even before he regained his balance, he was scrambling away from Kolob, retreating to the far edge of the circle. He expected retribution, and was almost eager for the sting of the lash, as if that would puncture the swelling balloon of agitation in his chest. But he was met with blank faces all around, silently allowing his words to echo in his mind.

_I am not, I am not, I am not… I am not?_

Galli cringed and twisted his fingers into the cloth of his robe, frying like a bug under the lens of the circle’s stares. 

“A bold, and arrogant claim.” Kolob gestured with his staff. “Particularly from a boy who cannot keep his feet on the floor when praying.”

Unvoiced laughter filled the air. Buried under this humiliation, Galli felt grotesque in his body, the balloon un-burst. “I don’t care!” he rasped. “I don’t want to sit still! I’m not a corpse!” The words were coming out of his mouth faster than he could think them. “I bet you wish I was dead, so I wouldn’t move at all!” 

The chime-staff smacked into his ankles — it might have simply meant to chastise, but his balance was poor, and the blow swept his feet out from under him. Galli’s chin cracked against the floor and he tasted blood where his teeth dug into his tongue. Stunned, he lay still. He could hear Kolob directing the other children out of the room. They all gave him a wide berth, as if he were rabid and contagious, hugging the walls as they shuffled towards the doorframe.

As the ragged curtain closed behind the last of them, Galli began to crawl away, towards the false refuge of the corner. His eyes threatened tears with their prickling. This was no way for a boy his age to act, he knew. And still, he could not help himself. 

His forearm was caught in a grip and he was hauled back to his feet. "Stand up straight," Kolob told him. "Have some dignity."

"You knocked me over!" Galli wailed.

"Enough of your dramatics. Pitching a fit and then throwing yourself on the ground, playing the victim. This is selfishness, Galli."

"I didn't," the boy whispered. "I didn't, I didn't." He whispered it over and over, like a protective chant. He wasn't even protesting anything in particular. 

Kolob let him go. Eventually, Galli fell silent. All he wanted was for this day to end, perhaps even to wake up on his cot and realize that none of this had been real.

"I've let this go on for far too long," Kolob was telling him. "I have been far too lenient. Too optimistic."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Galli said sullenly.

Now the anchorite's voice was unbearably stern, every word dropping like a stone. "Do you think you're the only child to ever misbehave? You're not the first, and you won't be the last. Most of them straighten themselves out. But there will always be those incurably wicked souls that are consumed by Darkness." 

_No_ , Galli wanted to say. _That's not me. I'm not one of them._

But maybe he was.

"Everyone here wants you to better yourself. Myself _most_ of all. You think I hate you, that I wish you were dead. These are Dark Side lies. They come from inside you and they fester and they rot your mind until you can hear nothing else."

"So I'm bad," Galli said. "I'm full of lies and rot. I get it." In that moment, he wished, as he never had before, to be so rotten, so blood-curdlingly vile that just touching him would shrivel Kolob's flesh. His heart quickened at the thought, but was he afraid to think such blasphemy, or thrilled?

"You understand nothing," Kolob told him coldly. "And you refuse to listen, and you refuse to learn."

Through clenched teeth, Galli hissed, "I guess that just makes you a bad teacher! What's there to listen to? It's boring and stupid and—!" He kicked the floor angrily, scattering sand. 

"Perhaps I _have_ been a poor teacher." The way Kolob said it frightened Galli, and he fell still, eyes widening, breaths coming in quick and shallow. "I took your insolence for childish ignorance. But you are not a stupid boy. You do not need to be coddled.” His fingers tightened around Galli’s arm once again.

_Let me go_ , Galli wanted to say. _Let me go... or you'll regret it!_ He couldn't speak.

And the anchorite was already pulling him towards the door. 

Blazing sunlight filled his eyes as he stumbled across the threshold; he squinted, felt the tears on his cheeks already drying into a crust of salt. The other children had all lined up for water; Brev and Nara had even left Galli's space between them open, but Kolob did not let him join them. Instead, he marched him out towards the storehouse where the water was kept. 

Next to the door of the storehouse, a tall earthenware pot was hanging from a rack. It was narrower at the base, with a few nubs for feet, and a wide open mouth covered by a cloth. A pair of metal handles flared out from the top, gleaming in the sunlight -- especially bright because he had cleaned this very pot over and over as punishment for idleness. He wondered if that would be his chore now, something useless and menial.

"Stand right there and listen carefully," Kolob told him. "Don't make things worse by trying to run away."

He let go of Galli's arm, then, and waited to see if he might bolt off. The boy did not move. 

"Now, for your lesson. Why must we keep still during prayers?"

Galli waded into his churning thoughts for an answer. "To... be respectful," he mumbled. 

"No. It has nothing to do with respect." Kolob opened the storehouse doors, and unwound the water hose from a hook. "Uncover the pot," he ordered. Galli pulled the cloth away from the mouth and set it aside. "Now fill it. Fill it to the brim, and _slowly_." 

Galli took the hose in hand, adjusted the nozzle, pointed it into the belly of the vessel. A bit of water suddenly spat out, like a sneeze, and then steadied into a stream.

"Slower. Slower than that."

The stream became a trickle. The nozzle felt warm, so the water was likely warm as well, at least the water that had been inside the hose. Warm like piss, Galli thought. It began to pool at the base of the pot. 

"If you are to understand an anchorite's duty, you must exercise your imagination. I am sure that's quite easy for you, in particular." Kolob put a hand on Galli's shoulder. It was not meant to be comforting. "Imagine that every drop of water filling this pot was a living, sentient soul."

Galli's brows bunched together. He had no idea where Kolob was headed with this. Nor did he care to play along. "It's just water," he said.

"Don't avert your eyes, ungrateful child. 'Just' water, indeed, that even a boy like you knows better than to waste. No one knows water like the ones who live without it. You have been thirsty before."

He was thirsty now. His tongue was like rubber. He wondered if he'd be sent away without water after this lesson was over. It wouldn't be the first time. He imagined lunging at the pot, like a sun-crazed happabore, to gulp down as much of it as he could right now before he was pulled away. But then he'd just be locked away in a penance closet for longer.

The trickle of water kept on running down the inner walls of the pot, forking and forming rivulets.

"Souls," repeated Kolob. "All of them, souls, like yours or mine. Tiny and fragile and easily lost. Can you see their faces? Can you hear their voices?"

Galli jerkily shook his head, but he couldn't look away from the rising water level. The surface rippled, hypnotic, glittering where it caught the sun's light.

"I wouldn't expect you to. Not even those who behold a planet from space can discern the millions of souls living upon it. They see nothing but a pool of shape and color, a formless mass. You, Galli, would be nothing to such an observer. Too small to even see."

A little nothing bug, squashed beneath feet. Was that the lesson? If so, he did not need to be taught it. He knew it well enough. 

Galli blinked, and an image flashed by in his mind, a waking dream. The great sandstorms, R'iia's breath, were said to have smothered all the life on the planet a thousand years ago. Whenever such storms rose up on the plain, the children of the habit house all hid in the basement and waited for them to pass. But for a moment, inexplicably, he saw himself on an open plain with no shelter in sight, the roaring orange cloud bearing down on him, ready to choke his lungs and rub his skin raw. 

His hands shook. The wobbling nozzle kept trickling out water.

"This is life. Fear and insignificance, and suffering to follow. But you are not just a sufferer. You live in service. You hold the pot of souls. That is the duty an anchorite is tasked with."

The water line was approaching the rim. Galli twisted the nozzle, let the last drops dribble out from the end. Kolob would have him believe they were souls. If they were, then they should be very afraid, their lives hanging off the tip of the metal spout. 

Kolob took the water hose from his hands. "Why must we keep still during prayers? Why must we not fidget, or lay idle, or wander? Why must we control our bodies, Galli? Because if we do not have perfect control of ourselves, we will fail in our duties. We will let souls slip away and be lost. See for yourself." He pointed back at the other children, all waiting in line. Galli could taste their animosity in the air. They were parched, like him, and he was the reason they had to wait. "Can you carry the water to them?"

The boy reached for the handles of the pot, cheeks stubbornly pouched. But he recoiled when his fingers touched the metal — it burned! But of course it would, having been scorched by the sun through the hottest hour of the day.

Kolob offered no words, no assistance. He did not demand anything further, but Galli knew he had to do it. The children on line resented him already. One of the bigger boys, Teko, was at the front, and Galli could vividly picture his indignation. Waiting thirty days to reach the coveted first spot, only to be cheated of the coldest drink because of a brat's mouthing-off. 

He tugged his sleeves down until the cloth covered his hands, and gripped the handles a second time. The water rocked back and forth precariously as he slid the pot from its rack. 

"And if you spill a single drop..." Kolob warned.

Galli held his breath. With the extremest deliberation, he turned towards the main building, and the rest of the orphans. _I won't,_ he thought. _I can be careful. I can hold still._

It seemed possible in the first few steps. The boy shuffled forward, sliding his feet in the sand. He watched the water line ripple. It did not spill. The next few steps went the same way, but the weight of the pot had already begun to tire his arms. 

The sun was reflecting off the water, an agitated disk of white fire. The more the water wobbled, the more the reflection flared and scattered. Galli let his breath out through his teeth and prayed for the sun to stay together. 

Heat from the pot handles was already seeping past the thin barrier of cloth he had pulled down over his palms. Within seconds it was bordering on painful. Galli struggled to adjust his grip — the stinging mounted until it was searing. Even the calluses on his hands could not block the pain. He wondered if this was part of the plan. If being burned made him drop the pot, all the water would be wasted, and that would be proof of his evil. He couldn’t give that much to Kolob. So he trudged on.

He found that if you forced a scream far enough back in your throat, it stayed there.

Halfway there. Just keep walking.

A streak of water slid down the outside of the pot. It evaporated into the thirsty air before it could drip to the ground. 

_He didn’t see, did he?_ Galli hastily took another step, but his wrists shook again, and a whole mouthful of water sloshed over the side. It was impossible to conceal. He froze in place, shaking. 

"Why have you stopped?” Kolob’s voice jolted him back into motion. The anchorite was standing somewhere behind him. “Do you think you’ve failed? Do you think your service over? Keep walking! Keep moving!”

_Let go of it!_ his hands howled. But between that pain and the center of his mind, there was a disconnect, a frayed circuit. He felt it, but could not place it as part of his body.

So he kept walking. Dark patches appeared in the sand at his feet, and then faded. The anchorite was still preaching from somewhere behind him, voice pitching up with fervor. 

“They are falling, Galli,” he said, “Falling and vanishing, never to be replaced. You see now, that there is no success. Only failure. But you cannot stop. You cannot fail again, and you will fail again, and you will lose more lives, lives you should have saved, but your duty will not be over! You grow angry when you are told that you are disobedient, or wicked, but we are all wicked, and the sooner you see this, the sooner you will be humbled before Erem.”

Galli had the urge to dash the vessel against the ground. It was a very ugly thought, because for that instant he was imagining that the pot really was full of people, all stirred together into a horrible slurry. But it was just a few more steps. The boy closest to him, Teko, was waiting stiffly, watching him. Just one more step.

The base of the pot dug into the sand. The weight lifted. Galli turned on his heel and fled to the very end of the line, head down, cradling his hands against his chest. He pressed himself as hard as he could into the wall of the habit house and boiled in agony, while the others silently filled their tin cups. 

At least they didn’t dare complain about the temperature of the water. They might think to shove him around later, in retribution, but—! Let them try it. He was itching to knock the first kid who came at him to the ground, and stuff their mouth full of sand.

His palms were red. They might start to blister soon. He wondered if that would distort the mark on his left hand. He wondered if they would have to brand it again, more deeply this time.

Chimes rattled behind him. Galli hid his face in the crook of his elbow. “What do you want now?” he whispered.

“Go to the infirmary,” was all Kolob said.

So Galli did. He couldn’t bear to look around, so he rooted his gaze on his feet and hugged the walls as he went.

The attendants in the infirmary were not very busy that day. Sometimes these rooms were full of townsfolk, and the children would be sent back and forth for fresh supplies while the adults tended to the infirm or unwell, changing their bedpans and pots of sick. Today, the cots were almost all empty, and a man was putting new bedding on one in the corner. Two of the cots were occupied, by very heavily bandaged figures whose legs were elevated off the ground in slings.

An older woman seized Galli by the shoulders as soon as he crossed the threshold. He showed her his hands, before she could ask what he was doing here.

“Now how did you burn yourself like that, Galli?” she asked, as she shuffled him towards a cot. “Did you fall into a cook-pit?” 

“No,” Galli told her. “It was a lesson.”

The woman pushed him down and manhandled his wrists until his palms were facing up. She was very brisk and efficient. “Well, did you learn your lesson?” she demanded. He mumbled a noise in response that could have been taken as a ‘yes’ by a careless listener. The woman inspected his reddened skin and then called over one of the attendants. “It’s not too severe. Fetch a compress.” 

As the attendant returned, Galli counted how many times the water dripped from the soaked cloth onto the floor and snidely thought, _sinner, sinner,_ at the man holding it _._ But when it was laid against his hands, the bitterness faded into relief.

After they bandaged him up, they let him lie down. It was acceptable, they agreed, because most of the cots weren’t being used. He wasn’t taking up space. They looked at him with pinched eyes and thinly pressed lips, which Galli couldn’t figure out, but he assumed it was because they knew he had been naughty. One of them pulled the wet compress out of his mouth when he started sucking on it. 

“What do you think you’re doing?” he was asked.

“I’m thirsty,” he responded. So he was brought a cup full of water, and the woman holding the pitcher refilled it several times without him even having to ask. Because his hands were so sore, she even held the cup to his mouth for him. He didn’t question this, just greedily gulped it all down.

When he was finally left alone, Galli pulled the thin sheets over himself. It was softer fabric than what he usually slept in, even if it was mysteriously stained and had a few holes in it that he could fit several fingers through. His gaze wandered up and around the room. The infirmary had taller ceilings, almost like one of the prayer halls, and the same bone chimes that teachers hung from their staves were rattling high above in the open windows. Warding off evil. Galli folded his pillow over his ears and closed his eyes.

He tried to lose himself in his thoughts, but his hands were aching badly. The pain kept yanking him out of the fantasies. Not only did it refuse to let him rest, but it put him in a dizzy, unfocused state. There were moments when he thought he was awake, but then his conscious would snap back into place and he would realize he had been on the verge of sleep. Then, for a torturous amount of time, he would be keenly aware of every sound in the room, from buzzing flies to clacking bones to the whistling nasal breaths of the people with their legs in slings. 

A few hours later, there was a greater interruption. Galli could hear people getting up and shuffling around, but he only opened his eyes when he heard a familiar voice. Kolob was standing in the doorway. Galli thought the man must be here to drag him back to the daily routine, but that displeasure dispersed into confusion. There was a tiny figure gathered in Kolob’s arms.

“She collapsed,” he explained, “during afternoon work.”

“What sort of work was it?” the older woman in charge asked. 

“Cleaning moisture filters. Not strenuous, but they were out in the sun.”

Galli shrank down into the covers of his cot. Kolob had not looked in his direction yet. The man’s expression was perfectly stiff, and slightly sour. He did not look down at the girl he was holding. Ayer was as limp as a broken-backed rodent in a predator’s jaws.

They laid her on a bed, and the older woman placed a hand on the girl’s forehead. “Temperature’s high,” she said.

Ayer stirred and seemed to become quite alarmed by something. She sat up, rigid and panting for air. “The mine!” she wailed. “He—! He was…” And then her voice caught, mouth hanging open while she rocked back and forth.

One of the attendants swooped in with a pot. They grabbed hold of the little girl’s hair and forcibly turned her head, and she vomited into the pot a mere instant later.

_The mine…_ The collapsed tunnel. Galli wondered what it was like to have a father, only to lose him to a pile of rubble. It seemed to upset Ayer quite a bit. 

Just a few days prior, there had been survivors from that incident filling the beds, with bruises and scrapes and fractures. But only the two with broken legs remained, because they couldn’t walk at all. Most people left the care of the anchorites as soon as they could, because without a day’s work, there would be no food.

While the attendants stood around Ayer and spoke in very hushed, troubled voices, Kolob raked his eyes over the room. He finally found Galli, or what of him was poking out from his nest of bedsheets. The man strode over to him, arms folded into his sleeves. 

So it was time to go, Galli figured. With reluctance, he began to extricate himself from his cocoon. When he slung his legs over the side of the bed, he pressed his palms too firmly into the mattress and the sharp burst of pain made him gasp and wince.

“Have you been saying your prayers?” Kolob was saying, and then he held up a dismissive hand. “No, I doubt it. You take every opportunity to waste your time in utter idleness.”

Galli opened his mouth to protest, and found no words. He _hadn’t_ been praying, had he? It was true. 

“At the very least you should exercise your mind. The others are all working hard. Do you think you should be exempted from that, after all your misbehavior?”

“No,” said Galli quietly. His lower lip quivered. Then he flung out an arm and pointed at Ayer. “But _she’s_ not working, is she?”

“She is sick.” Kolob regarded him sternly. “Why don’t you pray for her, Galli? It is the very _least_ you could do.”

And then, inexplicably, he turned on his heel and left. So Galli could stay, and rest a while longer. He settled back down on his bed, accepting this as some ineffable adult matter. Or maybe Kolob didn’t want him bringing more disorder to the group. Not after what happened to Ayer.

Because malicious thoughts were like stomach worms, the kind that ate people from the inside. Not only would you be consumed yourself, but if you sent the thoughts towards others, they might suffer the same fate. This was the power of the Dark Side, or so they were taught. 

Galli watched the little girl sweat and whimper on the bed. Had he been sending wicked thoughts at her? Maybe her sniffling had been annoying during prayers. Maybe it had been the reason why he couldn’t sit still. The reason he had been shamed and punished. But it didn’t count! The runny nose meant she was already ill! It didn’t matter what he had thought of her, or thought at her.

He knelt on the bed and began to whisper a chant, anyway. His gut was twisting uneasily. Guilt? It was impossible to tell.

It was impossible to tell, too, when exactly his prayers became something else, something he would later identify as a dream. He thought that he was walking out of the infirmary, out of the habit house entirely, into a dark blue evening. Only a lingering glow of orange sat far away on the horizon where the sun had set. He was thirsty again, and had an unsteady notion of going into the storehouse and drinking straight out of the water nozzle. But he placed his hands on the lock, and something stabbed into his hands, as if the door had put out snake-like fangs and bitten him. As he stumbled back, he thought, _they put a spell on it, to keep thieves like me out_ , as if that was the only explanation. 

He fell to his knees. Looking in the direction of the habit house, Galli saw a trail of dark splotches. Spilled water. He crawled towards the closest one, imagining he could somehow drink from the moisture in the ground. 

And the water did come out, rising from each patch in the sand as a pale gray mist. Galli’s eyes grew wide at the sight. At first the gouts of mist were formless. Then they blew towards him, in a gust of wind, and instead of dispersing, they became more distinct.

They were shaped like human silhouettes.

He scrambled away, feeling the blood draining out of his face. _No_ , he mouthed.

They floated closer. He could hear their voices. “Galli, Galli,” they whispered.

“ _No!_ ” he screamed. “Go away! Get away from me!” And he gabbled prayers at them, prayers and curses, anything he could remember, to ward them off.

The phantoms put out immaterial arms and reached for him, and he struggled to get back to his feet, but he kept lurching and slipping in the sand. He could feel ghostly breath on the back of his neck when he finally found his balance and began to run.

He knew that the ghosts in the mist were soaring after him. Their chill seeped into his back, and numbed his legs. When he chanced a look behind him, he saw a turbulent storm of faces, bright eyes and open mouths. 

His flight carried him out into the plain, further from the orphanage than he had ever been. To the left and right, he saw dark stains of moisture spewing more mist from the earth. The banks of mist closed in on him, cutting off his escape. Terrified, he collapsed and tried to make himself as small and still as possible. The misty ghosts surrounded him, stifling him, still murmuring his name over and over.

Galli woke to find his face pressed into a pillow. His legs and feet were uncovered, and he felt his bedsheets tangled up and draped over the small of his back. Night must have fallen, because of how cold it had become.

He refused to move. The memory of clammy hands still lingered on his skin. But he half-opened one eye, and found the bed in the center of the room where Kolob had left Ayer.

The girl was motionless, rolled over so only the back of her head could be seen. There were two anchorites standing by the foot of her bed, wearing heavier clothes than before, masks that covered their noses and mouths and thick gloves.

“She hasn’t kept down any fluids,” one was saying. 

“It’s too early to tell, though. The fever might break.”

“Poor girl. Force be with her.”

The second figure bowed their head. “Force be with her.”

Eventually, Galli rolled over, and wrapped himself back up in his meager blankets. Without any light, he could only faintly catch the shapes of the chimes over his head. The window had been closed, and the bones hung at rest.

Lessons didn’t usually sink into Galli’s stubborn head, but this one did. It might not have been what Kolob had been meaning to teach.

_This world is dead_ , the boy thought, and trembled where he lay, wondering how long it would be before he had given all his moisture to the dry earth.


End file.
